by Jay Boyer PS m W4 13 no .19 o o Boise State University Western Writers Series Number 79 By Jay Boyer Arizona State University Editors: Wayne Chatterton James H. Maguire Business Manager: James Hadden Cover Design and Illustration by Amy Skov, Copyright 1987 Boise State University, Boise, Idah o Copyright 1987 by the Boise State University Western Writers Series ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Libra ry of Congress Card No. 87·70030 International Standard Book No. Cl-8843().()78.1 Selections from Tlu AbQrlion, T1u Hawklim Mr.mster, Willard and His Bawl­ ing Trophies, Sombrero Falkme, and Dreaming ofBabylon are reprinted by per­ mission of Simon & Schuster. Printed in the United States of America by Boise State University Printing and Graphics Services Boise, Idaho At the age of forty-nine, Richard Brautigan committed suicide in a house he owned in Bolinas, California, a small coastal town some twenty miles north of San Francisco. Files from the Marin County Coroner's office and the office of the Sheriff of Marin Coun­ ty suggest that he stood at the foot of his bed looking out a window and put a handgun to his head, a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum he'd borrowed from his friend Jimmy Sakata, the sixty­ year-old proprietor of Cho-Cho's, a Japanese restaurant in San Fran­ cisco that Brautigan was particularly fond of. He shot himself around the first of October 1984. The precise date of his suicide cannot be determined since he was living alone at the time and his body, so badly decomposed that it defied recognition, was not discovered until 25 October 1984. Why did Brautigan take his own life? He left no note; he'd been in the house in Bolinas by himself for a month or more, and little that was discovered by way of personal effects-about two dollars in change, a bottle of Jack Daniels, some tranquilizers, and so on­ was illuminating. But then neither did those nearest to Brautigan seem to be too surprised that he'd done it. His daughter recalled that he'd often threatened suicide before, and it was said that he'd tried to kill himself in 1981 after he and his second wife, Aki, split up. He'd been despondent for some time. His drinking was far out of hand. The failure of his last five novels, culminating in his inability to find a publisher for a novel completed in 1983, 5 all seemed to have been contributing factors. Simply put, Brautigan's star had fallen. Once a favorite of the counterculture, his Trout Fishing in America alone had sold more than two million copies. In recent years, though, his read ers hip had slipped away. His last published novel, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, sold less than 15,000 copies, and the reviewers in this country ignored the book or dismissed it. And then too there were debts. He'd never been good with money. Like so many who grow up poor- sometimes desperately so-he could be both a miser and a spendthrift. He'd been known to ask for a receipt when buying a pack of gum; yet his telephone bills sometimes ran two or three thousand dollars-he was known to have read entire books to peo­ ple long distance. But since 1976 much of the money he' d earn ed seemed to go for living abroad-for living in Japan in particular, where he could still depend upon being received as a sensei, a serious and productive writer. He'd been living in Japan, in fact, not long before his suicide. He'd returned from Tokyo that spring and then he'd seen friends off and on during the summer. He left people with the impression that he was going to do some "serious" writing that fall in Bolinas, that he was going to shut himself off from enticements and distractions. What finally changed his plans, then? The drinking? His failing career? A skeleton in his closet? Like so many other things about Brau tigan, no one can say for sure. He was a very public figure , and yet he was in large part a mystery. To his critics and fans, to those who knew him best, for that matter, even the main facts of Brautigan's life were elusive. Brautigan was born on 30 January 1935 in Tacoma, Washingto n, and he was raised in Washingto n and the Pacific Northwest. Cir- 6 cumstences of his birth and memories of his childhood were sub­ jects Brautigan avoided. His father, Bernard Brautigan, left Richard's mother when she was pregnant with him. Brautigan 's mother would late r abandon Richard and his siste r when Richard was nine and come back for them only after he was sure she was gone for good. He knew at least three stepfathers, at least one of whom he said was a drunk who "thrashed" him repeatedly. For the most part Richard seems to have been left on his own to raise his younger sister Barbara while their mother worked. He began to write in high school, apparently. He worked odd jobs after school, his sister recalled, then spent all night at his writing-even though he'd been told it would never amount to anything. His writing seems to have been at least par t of the reason he left home. In the mid-1950s, just as the Beat Movement was beginning in the Bay Area, he arrived in San Francisco and became friendly with Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure , and Philip Whalen, with whom he roomed for a while. Ginsberg's public reading of BOUlt at the Six Gallery in 1955 signalled a new era of American poetry and soon small presses were appearing around the Bay Area and beyond, eager to publish. Brautigan found his way into print as a poet. Brautigan's earliest work is to be found alongside the work of other young poets in the cheaply run-off booklets we associate with that period. The Galilee Hitch-Hiker, published in 1958 by the White Rabbit Press, was as near as he had to a solo debut; but like much of his writing to this time, it was unusual without being distinctive. At best, Brautigan remained on the fringe of the San Francisco literary scene. He supported himself thro ugh odd jobs, delivering telegrams for Western .Union, for instance, writing new poems each day, sometimes as many as ten or twenty, then hang- 7 ing out in the evenings with others who were living much as he was. Ginsberg nicknamed him Bunthorne, after the poet in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, whose discourse, to paraphrase, is only idle chatter but of a transcendental kind, and the nickname took. Even among oddballs Brautigan was something of an oddball. He was thought to be sweet and untutored, very much the naif, ir­ responsible, a featherweight as a poet. He was generally liked, but he was no one you could count on. Some thought he might change when he met Virginia Adler in 1959 and married her shortly thereafter. She made a home for the two of them, the first real home he'd ever known, supported him through office work, eventually gave him a daughter, Ianthe, Brautigan's only child.But the marriage came to an end in 1963. Probable causes of the breakup include other women, some drink­ ing, his work. Writing and writers seemed to hold more of his attention than a wife and child and family life. Brautigan began to write prose as well as poetry after his mar­ riage- Ginny would later remark that he had to teach himself to write prose: everything he did seemed to come out as poetry-and from the time of his marriage through its breakup he managed two novels and the start of a third. The first of these, Trout Fishing in America, followed by A Confederate General from Big Sur, both appearing in print just as the Beat Movement seemed to be vanishing, were to provide him with an entrance into American letters. Poet, editor of The Evergreen Review, and owner of a nonprofit pre ss called the Four Seasons Foundation, Donald Allen was the driving force behind the publication of Brautigan's first two novels. Allen read the manuscripts and urged them on Barney Russett at Grove Press in New York. Rossett published A Confederate General first, explaining that since it was the more conventional 8 of the two it was more likely to be reviewed; but the reviews were tepid and the sales were disappointing, less than 800 copies in all, and with that, Rossett lost interest. Brautigan's career as a novelist might have been over before it really began had it not been for Allen and the New York agent Helen Brann. When Trout Fishing hadn't been issued by 1967, Allen asked for it back, saying that he'd decided to publish it himself, then fathered it through four printings. Despite the limitations of being issued by a small press, sales exceeded 30,000 copies as the novel found an audience among col­ lege students; but it did not really become a moneymaker until Helen Brann entered the picture. She approached Brautlgan, asked to represent him, then took Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, his third novel, and a collection of poems, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster; to Seymour Lawrence and Delacorte Press, arguing that a new market for paperback originals was opening up that the major houses had missed.